Activity – Evaluating the Feedback Teachers Give TO Students.

As I mentioned last week, I’m working with a client who is interested in helping her teachers to improve the overall quality of the feedback that they give to students. That’s an important step to take, given that feedback is one of the highest leverage practices that we use to help students achieve.

To help with that work, I pointed out that the best feedback given from teachers to students meets five basic criteria:

(1). It’s brief.

(2). It’s clear.

(3). It encourages thinking instead of compliance

(4). It’s ungraded

(5). It leaves time for subsequent action.

I’ve gone a step further, though, and developed an activity that can help teachers to reflect on the quality of the feedback given to students.

In the activity, teachers look at five different samples of student work that has been reviewed and returned with feedback to students. Then, they are asked to rank order the samples in order from “Most Effective Feedback Given to Students” to “Least Effective Feedback Given to Students.” Finally, a series of three reflection questions are asked to encourage teachers to think through the kinds of simple changes that they can make to improve the feedback that they are giving to the students in their classroom.